ICT in Rural empowerment, On demand provision of reliable, timely and actionable information overcoming the literacy barriers

Background:

A rural citizen is an information starved. Keeping in mind the literacy levels of rural population,  mobile voice is the most powerful channel to communicate and engage with leveraging Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system for the broadcasting of information in audio form.

Typically most of the NGO’s have 2 clear objectives for any rural engagement program :

1. Empower community groups especially women & marginalized section of society
2. Ensure accountability & transparency in governance

Traditionally ICT program’s and initiative’s to connect with the rural population in India have typically faced the following challenge:

• Low level of literacy
• Limited ownership of smart phones, largely low value features phones
• Non-availability or poor quality of internet
• Low % of answered calls due to phone not being charged/electricity supply being erratic
• Making the information viral/self-spreading

Ability to communicate with large population at the same time in their regional language/dialects Solution using ICT :

A single number based voice solution built on a cloud telephony platform for broadcasting pre-recorded automated voice calls, people who are unable to receive the call, can call back on the same number which functions as a missed call number and automatically generates an outbound voice call in the specific dialect with the voice communication for the day.

The system architect can be designed such that an audio library is created and the calling/called person has the option of listening to previous audio messages.

Read More: http://go2market.in/ict-in-rural-empowerment/